Divergent Is a Stale Take on the Young Adult Genre

Despite preaching originality, the movie leaves you feeling like you’ve seen it all before

There’s an awfully familiar feeling to Divergent, the movie based on the best-selling novel by Veronica Roth: postapocalyptic landscape, the almost colorless tones, the drab clothes–and, eventually, our ruthlessly scorned hero. It’s impossible to ignore the overwhelming sense that we’ve seen all this before, only with better execution, in this fall’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.